A Missing Unwanted Person
The Inquirer reports that it’s going to be rough getting LGA 775 chips, especially the fast ones.
Maybe it’s because they can’t make fast Prescotts. Maybe it’s because they can’t make even slow ones that can survive multiple encounters with the socket. It’s probably both.
Or maybe Intel has perfected vaporware in that the Prescotts run so hot that they just evaporate as fast as Intel can make them?
Who knows and who cares?
Abu Ghalib or Forest Lawn
Some people say, “Why don’t you jump on Intel like you do AMD?”
The one-sentence answer is that there’s a difference between abusing the living and kicking the dead. You might get the live one to change his ways; the dead are beyond that.
We pronounced Prescott DOA, at least for overclockers, and it’s still dead. After you pronounce a corpse dead, and bury it, what else is there to do? You can’t insult a corpse into doing better. It’s gone; it’s over; it is no longer a factor. You can’t call a product anything worse than dead.
Well, yes, Prescott isn’t technically dead and buried yet. It’s still in the morgue and starting to smell really bad, but Intel keeps saying they can resurrect it and more importantly, won’t pay for a cemetery plot.
Well, they may muddle through on the OEM side, but for overclocking, we’re not holding our breaths for any resurrection, and neither should you.
Realistically, for at least the next year, the choice for a cutting-edge system will not be between Intel and AMD. In fact, there will be no choice at all.
Your choices will be either a future expensive somewhat dull AMD knife, current cheap much duller AMD or Intel knives, or nothing at all.
Another way to put it is the CPU competition these days is “Can’t Vs. Won’t.”
Intel can’t fix their problems, which are technological, anytime soon. AMD won’t fix their problems, which are primarily psychological.
Yes, I’m aware of the reports that AMD sold about a million Hammers in the first quarter of 2004, quite a bit more than we estimated at the time. On Saturday, we’re going to talk more than a bit about that, and give you some rather surprising results we’ve uncovered from some new detective work.
In the months and more ahead, we’ll have to do the twenty-first century equivalent of the old Saturday Night Live line and periodically report that “Prescott is still dead”** whenever there’s any danger of unsuspecting people buying one, but that’s about all you can do.
** For the young or unaware or perhaps the U.S. citizenship-challenged, Saturday Night Live is a long-running Amercian TV comedy show. Back in 1975, they reported Francisco Franco’s death, then for months thereafter, kept reporting that he was still dead.
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